Harvesting Silence

I have had many conversations this week with contemplative friends, people careful with the tending of their minds and souls, attentive to what is happening there, within.  This is no small feat in these last days of the harvest season.  These friends speak of their hunger for silence, the grace of achieving it even briefly, and the insights that appear like the blazing light of the fallen leaves when they are able to so.  Silence also equips them to attend to the world with greater stillness, compassion, and wisdom.  To see, as mystics and poets — as we are meant to see.

Today I share a poem by Lisel Mueller that expresses this quality of silence and sight and grace, a poem harvested from her own silence in this season of migrations and unending change.

 

A Grackle Observed

 

Watching the black grackle

come out of the gray shade

Into the sun, I am dazzled

by an unexpected sheen,

yellow, purple, and green,

where the comb of light silkens

unspectacular wings —

until he, unaware

of what he means at this one

peculiar angle of sun,

hops back to his modest dark

and leaves the shining part

of himself behind, as though

brightness must outgrow

Its fluttering worldly dress

and enter the mind outright

as vision, as pure light.

 

May it be so for you.  Namaste.